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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4248 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

  • The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
  • The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
  • Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
  • Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work. However the idea of neural networks for semantic classification or machine translation or similar has been known for a very long time, so I could totally see them trying to use the (quite meh) state of the art at the time with a lot of compute.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

Probably over 10%? A lot of people, including people with power, say things that are various degrees of lies.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work.

It's an offshoot of the widely-reposted AI Twitter claim that 'we could have trained GPT-2 in 2004' (or with 2003 levels of supercomputer compute). And that might well be true, idk. Here's one of the biggest sources.

What's less believable is that nobody involved in this hypothetical effort at the NSA decided to just get rich in the private sector after coming up with technology decades ahead of the competition.

Guess i was wrong! I'd actually read that post before, seems I forgot.

Sometimes my "real" justifications build on a lot of accumulated knowledge and ideas, and writing those all out would take longer than I wanted, so I don't, and substitute for something shorter instead. Sometimes the shorter thing is wrong, though. So my 'real' reason for saying .1% was something about how mathematics and coordination and coming up with ideas is hard, and as we observe society develop we're seeing the best of everyone we have slowly stumble into being more and more correct, and it's almost impossible to beat that privately on something as big as 'GPT' because you have to do all of the research work that tens of thousands of the brightest machine learning researchers did in public over the past few decades. Like, the manhattan project was secret, but it used all of the best people we had and wasn't secret forever. The NSA can keep some cryptographic techniques secret, but not the entire concept of cryptography secret.

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